(Source: HUP)
Harvard
University Press is publishing a new book on environmental law and policy in the
Republican Party from Nixon to President Trump.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Not long ago,
Republicans could take pride in their party’s tradition of environmental
leadership. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the GOP helped to create the
Environmental Protection Agency, extend the Clean Air Act, and protect
endangered species. Today, as Republicans denounce climate change as a “hoax”
and seek to dismantle the environmental regulatory state they worked to build,
we are left to wonder: What happened?
In The
Republican Reversal, James Morton Turner and Andrew
C. Isenberg show that the party’s transformation began in the late
1970s, with the emergence of a new alliance of pro-business, libertarian, and
anti-federalist voters. This coalition came about through a concerted effort by
politicians and business leaders, abetted by intellectuals and policy experts,
to link the commercial interests of big corporate donors with states’-rights
activism and Main Street regulatory distrust. Fiscal conservatives embraced
cost-benefit analysis to counter earlier models of environmental policy making,
and business tycoons funded think tanks to denounce federal environmental
regulation as economically harmful, constitutionally suspect, and unchristian,
thereby appealing to evangelical views of man’s God-given dominion of the
Earth.
As Turner and
Isenberg make clear, the conservative abdication of environmental concern
stands out as one of the most profound turnabouts in modern American political
history, critical to our understanding of the GOP’s modern success. The
Republican reversal on the environment is emblematic of an unwavering faith in
the market, skepticism of scientific and technocratic elites, and belief in
American exceptionalism that have become the party’s distinguishing
characteristics.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Morton Turner is Associate
Professor of Environmental Studies at Wellesley College. His first book, The
Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964, received
the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award for the best book in conservation
history by the Forest History Society in 2013. Turner has received grants from
the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation
in support of his research in environmental history, politics, and policy.
Turner has also been active in local sustainability initiatives in
Massachusetts.
Andrew C. Isenberg is the Hall
Distinguished Professor of American History at the University
of Kansas and
the author of many books about the American West and the environment. He has
been a Fulbright Scholar, an inaugural fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for
Environment and Society in Munich, and a contributor to documentaries,
including America before Columbus and the award-winning Facing
the Storm: Story of the American Bison and American
Experience: Wyatt Earp.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Conservatives
before and after Earth Day
2. Visions of Abundance
3. The Cost of
Clean Air and Water
4. American
Exceptionalism in a Warming World
Conclusion
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
More information
here
No comments:
Post a Comment